How about you include in the "Proportionality" argument, the fact that Israel has to largely take out the HAMAS command structure to avoid a repeat of 7 October in a few months' time?
They would have to establish that's the case, not just speculate that maybe it would.
Bear in mind the bomb shelter example I gave was the largest use of proportionality by the US military in Iraq and it was 400 people. A few other cases involved a dozen or less. I don't think any others exceeded 30 civilian deaths at once even. Large numbers of civilians are very hard to justify.
Can't you argue that even a low proportion of HAMAS officials vis a vis Gazan civilians justifies a bomb or artillery strike due to the overwhelming necessity of destroying those HAMAS officials to protect Israeli civilians in the near future?
I think that would be tough to sell. Less than 2000 Israeli civilians have been killed by Hamas in total since it's inception. October 7th is the first attack that's caused large loss of life and it accounts for way more than half. It would be difficult for Israel to justify, especially now that there's discussion about potential strikes on hospitals with 14,000 civilians in them.
The Israeli math only works if Israeli civilians are some multiple "more valuable" than other civilians. That outlook is not supported in the laws of war.
Let me give 2 examples and compare them. Desert Storm - the US gets intel that a hospital contains 100 civilian patients and 1 Israeli Ba'ath official. The US vectors in a thunder run by A-10's and kill everyone in the hospital. Clear war crime, if you use the proportionality argument, right?
Yes. And establishing proportionality in this case would be difficult.
Let's transfer that hospital to Gaza and the Ba'ath official becomes a top HAMAS official who organized 7 October and has stated that if he survives, he will organize further atrocities to "kill the infidel pig Jews". If that same man is going to murder 200 Israeli civilians in February 2024, isn't it "proportional" to wipe out that hospital?
I think you're also confused about proportionality. It's not a "proportion of us vs them", the proportionality is in comparing the military advantage gained vs the loss of life. You're asking if it's justified to knowingly kill 100 civilians to take out 1 man who is going to conduct an operation you know is he's going to conduct in 3 months. If your intelligence is that good, why can't you stop the attack some other way? Or evacuate he target? Or wait for him to leave the hospital? Waiting for assets to leave civilian areas before taking them out happened all the time in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the military objective could be achieved without the loss of civilian life, then it must be. I haven't really mentioned that before because I assumed it was understood. The primary focus of most laws of war is minimizing civilian deaths. If you can spare them, you must spare them.
The rules of war aren't about saying "here's when you can kill civilians". It's about saying "do everything you possibly can to spare civilian lives and as a last resort here is how to determine if violating that tenet is justified." So you can't just say, "But what about..." because military intelligence still would need to ensure they literally have no other way to accomplish the objective. An intelligence operator's job isn't to set out to find loopholes that let them kill civilians. Their job is to examine every possible angle available to accomplish the mission without killing civilians, or at least without intentionally killing civilians, and only as a last resort to make sure that the blood that's going to be on their hands is necessary and justified.
So you can put anything you want in that calculation. And people will always disagree with you. Certainly none of us will know what intelligence Israel has because they're not stupid enough to publicize their intelligence. But at current count they've killed over 17,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, since Hamas was founded in retaliation for less than 2,000 Israeli deaths, so they've got a very high bar to meet if they're going to say all those were necessary and lawful under proportionality.